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Geothermal-Powered USA: One Step Closer to Reality?
by Stacy Feldman - Jun 24th, 2008
The Economist touches on something big in its cover story on clean energy this week: "geothermal could be hot."
"The recoverable heat in rock under the United States is the equivalent of 2,000 years-worth of the country’s current energy consumption."
Yes! The MIT researchers that crunched those numbers have been beating this drum for a while. (And so have we.)
And now for a related and interesting progress report.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service have just initiated a public comment period on their draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for geothermal leasing all over the American West, including Alaska.
Here's the impetus for the proposal, from the press release (pdf):
Federal lands in the West and Alaska contain the largest potential geothermal resources in this country.
The draft document proposes to open up 117 million acres of BLM public lands and 75 million acres of National Forest Service lands to geothermal drilling.
Doing so would mean this. By 2015, the lands could host 110 new geothermal plants capable of producing 5,500 megawatts of power, all the while protecting the "special resource values" of the public lands and forests. By 2025, an additional 132 geothermal plants could produce another 6,600 megawatts of power.
(By way of background, total installed geothermal capacity in the US stands at around 3,000 megawatts, 90 percent of which is in California. Under the MIT scenario, 100,000 megawatts of additional new capacity using Enhanced Geothermal Systems is possible by 2050 -- for less than $1 billion spread out over 15 years.)
The draft PEIS will remain open for public comment until mid-September or so. Meanwhile, BLM will hold public meetings in 13 cities throughout the West in July. As part of the process, the PEIS has also evaluated another (less-favored) alternative to limit geothermal drilling to areas near transmission lines.
At the very least, this new push should help to give geothermal power, the nation's biggest untapped energy resource, more of the public and media attention it deserves.
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Geothermal vs Oil
Don't let this out until it happens, cause if you do, Georgie Bush and his boys will decide to have some government bureaucracy do a 'two year' study on it for as many 'two years' as it takes to stuff their private personal pockets with $142+bbl oil profits - so keep it hush hush guys, or you'll get snafued by the oil barons!
Hydrothermal, EGS
Just a note of caution -- the PEIS addresses potential hydrothermal geothermal, not Enhanced, or Engineered, Geothermal Systems, which is what was discussed in the MIT report.
Hydrothermal resources are the ones most folks have in mind when they talk about geothermal -- production wells are at relatively shallow depths (less than about 2 miles), and they tap existing hot water (mostly) or steam (very rarely).
Looks like it would take about a day of work....
See this video... all the way through. Full display of what it takes to tap geothermal
http://www.usgs.gov/video/wr/ofr/2008/1014/
Amazing proof of concept video (in the US at Yellowstone - Iceland has it all over the place)
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